Minerva Labs Continues Growth in Endpoint Security Market in 2017

PETACH TIKVA, Israel, Dec. 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --Minerva Labs, a leading provider of anti-evasion technology, today announced continued growth in 2017 with fourth-quarter revenue growing more than double over the prior year. The key factors fueling this growth were the company's continued business expansion and innovation within their Anti-Evasion Platform, including the industry's first, enterprise ready Endpoint Malware Vaccination module for incident response teams that scales across the organization. These new offerings and services garnered increased value for customers and partners. In addition, Minerva launched their partner program, Minerva Value Partner Program (MVP²), which has obtained excellent adoption by both the VAR and MSP community, with 20+ partners signed up so far in North America and Europe.

In 2017, Minerva announced the closing of a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by Amplify Partners, which the company utilized to accelerate adoption and deployment of its Anti-Evasion Platform, as well as help support growth opportunities in global sales and marketing efforts. Additional investors that participated in the funding round were StageOne Ventures and Webb Investment Network.

"I am amazed by how much we are able to accomplish in just 12 months. The sustained, global growth we are seeing as a company is astounding," said Eddy Bobritsky, CEO, Minerva Labs. "I view this as continued inspiration for us to bring forth everlasting innovation in cybersecurity, which is needed in a world full of devious, capable cyber criminals. I attribute our continued success to sustained recognition for our solutions and the consistent addition of new customers seeking an innovative way of protecting their endpoints beyond baseline anti-malware technologies."

Expanding Minerva's Anti-Evasion PlatformIn 2017, Minerva Labs released several, significant updates to their Anti-Evasion Platform in enhancing endpoint defense from evasive threats. In addition to their Hostile Environment Simulation which mimics the presence of security products that evasive malware is designed to bypass, Minerva Labs released:

Memory Injection Prevention, which allows organizations to block threats that use fileless and other in-memory techniques to hide malicious code in legitimate processes to evade detection by anti-malware products.

Malicious Document Prevention, which blocks malicious actions initiated by document files, such as those that employ macros, PowerShell and other scripts.

Endpoint Malware Vaccination, which allows enterprise incident response teams to simulate infection markers as a way of vaccinating endpoints against specific malware families. This unique capability helps Minerva's customers contain malware outbreaks and prevent infections even if other defensive capabilities were unable to block the attack.

Ransomware Protection, which prevents malware from destroying the victim's files even if ransomware found a way to bypass other security defenses, protecting the organization from data loss.

Prevention of Malicious AttacksAs adversaries continued to expand their use of evasion tactics in 2017, Minerva's approach to strengthening endpoint security with the first ever scalable endpoint prevention by covering the gap left by traditional and "next-gen" antivirus products were effective against many evasive threats. Examples of the malicious programs that the company's Anti-Evasion Platform was able to block automatically with no human/incident response interaction and without relying on any signatures, malware patterns or models included:

Evasive banking trojans – Minerva Labs was able to prevent many banking Trojan attacks at customer sites without any prior knowledge or signature update. Among the attacks prevented were: Emotet, Trickbot, Qbot, Ursnif and others.

Minerva Labs helped support the security community by creating a number of free vaccinations for WannaCry, Spora, and a free, open-source tool for automatically extracting mutex infection markers for endpoint vaccination, named Mystique.

Minerva proved successful in preventing targeted attacks such as Not Petya and the CCleaner malicious backdoor which specifically targeted IT companies using a supply chain attack to compromise a vast number of victims. Minerva helped prevent the entire attack with its Memory Injection Prevention module.

Cryptomining malware has become an emerging threat lately due to the ease of cashing out illicit gains, with a lower risk of being detected. Minerva is dedicated to researching this phenomenon and earlier this month revealed WaterMiner, an example of a cryptomining campaign that hides in gaming 'mods' and infects victims with a simple yet effective Monero mining malware which is designed to hide from endpoint monitoring tools. More to come on this in 2018.

Malware authors continue to look and inevitably find new ways of abusing features of document-processing applications to infect systems. One such evasive technique is using weaponized documents to deliver malware. Minerva Labs Anti-Evasion Platform can successfully block these attacks without any updates such as the recent issues in Microsoft Office Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). DDE allows adversaries to deliver stealthy payloads via document files while avoiding the common usage of macros.

"After a detailed review, I found that Minerva Labs provides their customers with enhancements to traditional and next-generation endpoint security solutions," said Dr. Eric Cole. "Minerva is highly effective at blocking evasive malware that is designed to evade other security measures."

Minerva Labs will be hosting a webinar with Dr. Cole and Minerva Labs VP of Products Lenny Zeltser titled "Using Anti-Evasion to Block Stealth Attacks". The webinar will be held Thursday, December 7, 2017 at 1 p.m. (ET). To register, please visit: https://www.sans.org/webcasts/106290. A recording of the session will be available for those unable to join live.

About Minerva Labs

Minerva Labs is an innovative endpoint security solution provider that protects enterprises from today's stealthiest attacks without the need to detect threats first, all before any damage has been done. Minerva Labs Anti-Evasion Platform blocks unknown threats which evade existing defenses by deceiving the malware and controlling how it perceives its environment. The technology is able to stop malware that AV does not without relying on signatures, models or behavioral patterns. Minerva Labs solution deceives the malware and causes it to disarm itself, thwarting it before the need to engage costly security resources.

Headquartered in Petach Tikva, Israel, and with offices in New York and Atlanta, Minerva Labs boost customers' existing defenses without the need to embark upon a costly and risky overhaul of their entire endpoint security architecture. To learn more about Minerva Labs, visit www.minerva-labs.com.